Kenmore Hotel: The Place at the End of the Line

By RICK BRAGG

Published: June 10, 1994

One old woman walks through the Kenmore Hotel and spells her name over and over, as if she is afraid of losing it somewhere down the long, dark hall. Another woman, her cheeks rouged a candy-apple red, goes from person to person in the lobby, asking people she has never seen before what they would like for dinner.

On the eighth floor, a man sits amid jumping fleas, crusted dirt and six-month-old newspapers, screaming that he should not have to live like this because he is an American.

Down the hall, a transvestite whose only possessions are a purple party dress and a fake fox fur with a hole in it talks about how the Kenmore is really not as bad as it looks, as the water backs up in the sink for the fifth straight day and a rat runs past a pile of garbage in the hall.

And on every floor, single mothers and families and other hard-working people are just trying to survive amid the craziness.

It is a blessing to be a little mad in the Kenmore, say some of the people who live there, held prisoner by their poverty and victimized by criminals who prosecutors say controlled whole floors of the building.

The 621-room Kenmore, a red-brick residential hotel at 145 East 23d Street, was seized by United States marshals on Wednesday under a little-used 1984 law that allows the authorities to take over a building being used in the sale of drugs. It had become a bizarre warehouse for crack dealers, prostitutes, robbers and extortionists, said both Federal investigators and people who live there. The criminals did not go outside. They worked the halls, said the residents.

"You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to live in the suburbs," said Phillip Yee, standing in one hall, his bare feet dirt encrusted. "I like the suburbs. In the suburbs, your neighbors don't light fires in the hall."

Residents said the hotel owner, Tran Din Truong, a Vietnamese immigrant who prosecutors say used the Kenmore as a "cash cow," allowed the building to fall apart, the filth to collect and the toilets to overflow, even as he allowed it to become a haven for criminals.

Rent that is considerably less than the usual Manhattan rate -- $200 a month for a room the size of a closet, with the bathroom down the hall, or $400 for a slightly bigger room -- has filled it over the years with elderly residents; poor people with physical, mental and emotional problems; welfare mothers, and others who cannot afford anything better.

"This is what I have to live in," said John Grant, 38, who sat on a bare narrow mattress in a filthy hole, five feet wide and about eight feet long. His voice became higher, shriller, as he talked. "Look at me. I'm dying in here. I'm dying."

He said he was unemployed, disabled and had lived in the Kenmore for 14 years. He does not own any pictures or keepsakes. The walls of his room are covered with yellowed newspaper photos that he likes to look at.

"It's not fair," he said, almost screaming. "It's not fair."

The Kenmore has been a rundown apartment house for as long as anyone can remember, but when the predators moved into the building and sold their drugs and stole from people who had almost nothing to give, when the prostitutes started having sex with clients in the stairwells and halls, the quality of life dipped even lower. The old people suffer most, said Kirk Mickels, 39, who lives on the 19th floor.

"Some are afraid to come out of their rooms," he said. "Some shouldn't be here. Some have mental problems. Some have health problems, and these people prey on them."

Dennis Brady, 43, studied music at Lehman College in the Bronx and once dreamed of being a concert pianist, but eviction from a building that went co-op, loss of a hotel job and injuries he suffered from being run over by a soda-delivery truck landed him in the Kenmore. He said he has neck, head and back pain, but he worries more about the old people there who may never get to live anywhere else.

His tiny room is crowded with books like "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" and "Celtic Heritage." One of his favorites is "Purity of Heart," by Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard, he said, would find hope in the lives of the people there, but he would want society to help them.

Others have lived worse than this already. A Way Station

For Mr. Mickels, 39, his little room is just a place to catch his breath.

"I've been told this is the last stop, but I don't believe that," said Mr. Mickels, bouncing his visiting 2-year-old grandson, Eric, on his knee.

Mr. Mickels moved into the $120-a-week room in March, shortly after being released from prison after serving six years for a crime he would rather not discuss.

"A lot of us make mistakes, and a lot of us recover," said Mr. Mickels, who grew up on Wyona Street in East New York.

Each morning he sweeps his room and then sweeps the hallway, he said, explaining that there has not been any janitorial service for a long time.

On the wall of his room, just to the left of an immaculate porcelain wall sink, are button-photos of Malcolm X and Marvin Gaye, and a photograph of Mr. Mickels, as an inmate, coordinating an entertainment event at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, N.Y.

"I want to do prison counseling," said Mr. Mickels, who is in a training program run by the Fortune Society, a nonprofit organization that helps former convicts.

He said that when he leaves the Kenmore, he doesn't want to travel far from needy people, explaining that "I want to live in the ghetto. A little place. A little car. And some food in the house would be nice."

On the hotel's eighth floor, two dark rooms are joined a by a small bathroom, and for four years this suite has been home to Lonie Houng, 40, her four young children and her husband, Steven Kaplovich, 59, who makes $24,000 a year as a handyman in a Sutton Place apartment building.

The children -- Max, 5; Joey, 6; Jonathan, 9, and Juliana, 8 -- sleep on mattresses on the floor of a main room with cracked and peeling walls. The toilet does not work; water has to be poured from a bucket into the tank to flush it.

There are vermin, "lots of mice," Ms. Houng said. The family's cat, Con Mel, lies purring in a dresser drawer, asleep. He is the first line of defense, when he is awake.

"I don't mind this that much, but I feel bad for the babies. They sleep on the floor and they have asthma," Ms. Houng said. "We can survive with no problem, but they need space and they can't eat good food here. I cook on a hot plate."

Conditions at the hotel are better, in some ways, than those she left when she was brought to the United States at 14 by an American airman who became her first husband.

"There was shooting," she said of her childhood in Pleiku, where she was raised by her father, Vu Quang Trong, whom she described as "the second most famous painter in my country."

A year ago, Ms. Houng was robbed by a man in the hallway who tried to stab her. He missed when she sank to the floor, she said. "We would move," she said. "But it is hard to find people to take us with four children."

Mr. Yee said people who live in the hotel should expect life to be hard. He said people get what they pay for.

Down the hall from him, residents point to a metal exit door that has been dented several times. One resident explained that it happened when one man repeatedly clubbed another man in the head with a baseball bat but missed several times and hit the door.

Photos: Lonie Houng, her husband and four children live in two small rooms at the Kenmore Hotel. "I don't mind this that much, but I feel bad for the babies. They sleep on the floor and they have asthma," Ms. Houng said; Dennis Brady, 43, sitting on the bed in his room next to a piece of his door, which was forced open by law enforcement officers. (Photographs by Ed Quinn for The New York Times) (pg. B2)